Back to Openbox

Soon afterward I realized my disappointment with the desktop was rooted in IceWM, and not just in the theme I had built up around it. So I’m back to Openbox now.

And because I was feeling a little nostalgic, I put that together to mimic a desktop I was using about four years ago, also at Christmas. The machine has changed, the distro is different, but the look is similar.

I still have a little bugs to iron out, here and there. I haven’t relied singularly on Openbox for the better part of a year, and there are some shortcuts and configurations to learn.

And it has been even longer since I tinkered with conky. I know: What I have there is rather primitive, compared to what it can do.

But this will suffice for now, and should keep me fairly busy over the next few days. My real-world obligations peak today and then I should be able to coast into a nice, long, well-deserved end-of-year holiday. And I have a few things planned. :twisted:

No, although any time I can impress a nerd, I call it a successful day. :twisted:

Mostly I was having problems with windows migrating southward after they were closed and reopened. That, and editing the menu was somehow corrupting it and making it unreadable to the running session.

Little things like that were starting to annoy me. I should have probably just started over from scratch, with a blank IceWM installation. But the idea of building these things up from nothing is sometimes intimidating. :(

I think this had something to do with the way the closing application was storing its last window position, and how IceWM was interpreting that location when the application was reopened. I hadn’t ever noticed it before, but every time I opened the application, the box shifted downward slightly. It’s not a big deal, but it was one of those things I couldn’t seem to correct without undue labor.

And I don’t know if menu maker would have solved the menu problem or not. I literally entered one blank line in a working .icewm/menu file, and suddenly the file was unreadable. Very strange.

No matter. I’m sure I will be back to it in the future. I just need a little break, that’s all. ;)

I have always been impartial to very simple desktops, but always found my self dragged back to Gnome. Heck my gnome desktop doesn’t have any gnome panels, but instead I use AWN docks because they are more fun and versatile However it always seame as though you stick to small little Linux distros than the big fat fat-clients like Ubuntu. Why is this? Is it just a preference or is it hardware condition, or …..

How different is Openbox to Fluxbox/ I’ve been using Fluxpup (Puppy Linux with Fluxbox) for nearly two years but I think Fluxbox is now no longer updated (what is the proper word for that?) so I’ll have to make the switch at some point I guess.

They have similarities and differences; for my own part Openbox is cleaner and less obsfuscated. It’s rare that I see a Fluxbox setup that doesn’t confuse me with endless submenus and configuration options.